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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Thu, 1 May 2025 15:18:23 +1000
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On 1/05/2025 6:16 am, Lasse Langwadt wrote:
> On 4/30/25 08:41, Bill Sloman wrote:
>> On 30/04/2025 1:48 am, Lasse Langwadt wrote:
>>> On 4/29/25 16:42, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>>> On 29/04/2025 10:24 pm, Martin Brown wrote:
>>>>> Spain suffered a very spectacular near total loss of its national 
>>>>> grid yesterday taking parts of France and all of Portugal down with 
>>>>> it. This is an unprecedented failure of a supergrid system by 
>>>>> cascade failure.
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems likely they had got the effect of widespread solar PV has 
>>>>> on load shedding wrong (much like happened in the UK) and so it 
>>>>> failed completely. Two events a second apart delivered the coup de 
>>>>> grace.
>>>>>
>>>>> They seem to have ruled out cyber attack and the electricity 
>>>>> company is now trying to blame "the wrong sort of temperature 
>>>>> variations"...
>>>>>
>>>>> Their 400kV lines seemed to be taking the blame with the national 
>>>>> power company blaming exceedingly rare atmospheric phenomena due to 
>>>>> "large" temperature differences in central Spain. They claimed that 
>>>>> the magical sounding "induced atmospheric vibration" was to blame.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-portugal-power-outage-cause-cyber-attack-electricity
>>>>>
>>>>> Another marginally plausible explanation given was that different 
>>>>> impedances on cables at radically different temperatures on 
>>>>> different paths messed up the phasing (but the numbers don't look 
>>>>> right to me).
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyone have any idea what actually happened?
>>>>>
>>>>> The only one I am aware of that can take 400kV supergrid down is 
>>>>> cables clashing together in older pylon configs where they are 
>>>>> exactly one above the other and resonance effects allowing large 
>>>>> amplitude standing waves to build up in the spans can occur in 
>>>>> 70+mph winds.
>>>>>
>>>>> Most UK ones now have a longer central pylon spur so that the lines 
>>>>> are more widely separated and up-down motion cannot allow them to 
>>>>> touch.
>>>>>
>>>>> They do sing quite impressively in a gale though. The little 
>>>>> weights at each end are apparently there to prevent such standing 
>>>>> wave resonances damaging the pylon structure. Without them some 
>>>>> pylons did fall down in the distant past during the most extreme of 
>>>>> winter storms.
>>>>
>>>> The Guardian's science and technology reporting has never been great.
>>>>
>>>> The idea that renewable sources make the grid frequency harder to 
>>>> manage sounds like total nonsense.
>>>>
>>>
>>> that depends, PV doesn't provide inertia like spinning turbines
>>
>> But grid scale batteries do - pumped hydro storage has the spinning 
>> turbines, but grid scale batteries have invereters, which can reacta 
>> lot faster than any spinning turbine, Photovoltaic power is variable 
>> so it needs energy storage of some sort to smooth out the variations.
> 
> production dropped 15GW in 5 seconds, all the grid batteries in 
> Australia combined is about 1/5 of that ....

Australia has a population of 27 million people - a lot fewer than Spain 
- and we haven't yet got as many grid batteries as we will need. 
Roof-top solar is pretty popular in Australia, and people are starting 
to buy Tesla Powerwalls and the like so that they can use the power they 
generate during to day to keep the house lit and powered up overnight.

Eventually the utility companies will get around to integrating this 
storage capacity into the grid structure, along with parked electric car 
batteries. Nobody wants the utilities to use it all the time, but 
exploiting it as emergency back-up would be sensible.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney